Disney Princesses

I "read" the Disney Princess capstone. I really liked this presentation for many reasons. For starters I had never heard of prezi.com, so i thought the lay-out of the project was really cool, (side note* i will probably use that sight for my next project I have to do next semester, so thanks for the idea team!) But anyways, the other reason I was drawn to the project was because as a little girl I so absolutely loved Disney Princesses! Ariel was my favorite princess, I loved that she would use humanly things such as a fork, to comb her hair! Ha I do have to admit that I even was the Little Mermaid for halloween! (my mom made a home-made mermaid costume, which made all my friends jealous!) But now that I am older, and I watch the Disney movie series, in the eyes of a college cultural studies I do have to admit that the "princesses" that the Disney franchise has marketed over the last 60 years are very much an imaginable concept of what women should be portrayed as. I commend Disney for improving over the years, to the point where they added different races of women to the bunch, but their efforts were not enough. Where is the overweight princess? Or the princess with glasses? Or the short princess with the athletic build? As much as Disney has tried to appeal to more audiences and become more culturally diverse, they have failed to step away from the one stereotype that still is glued to the name princess- beauty. Why is it that in order to be a princess you have to be drop-dead gorgeous? If that were the case they might as well limit the sales of princess merchandise to petite, cute little girls, and not even let the chubby girls buy the princesses, because it is putting the idea that you have to be thin, long-legged, and beautiful to be a princess, and chubby girls are never going to be that. As much as Disney is trying to break the cultural gap, they really need to try further!